Can you help us identify these images?

Can you help us identify these images? Go to the Eames Office Facebook page to learn more and share your insights!

The Eames Office is calling upon you to help with an exciting project. You might call it a treasure hunt—and it’s most certainly an opportunity to flex your cultural, art historical and mathematical muscles!

In the 1960s, the Eameses’ created a beautiful timeline of the history of mathematics from 1000 AD to the present as part of their exhibition Mathematica: A World of Numbers . . . and Beyond. IBM gave away the timelines to schools around the world for over 20 years. Teachers still swear by it, and the Eames Office gets frequent requests for it from people who assume it was made recently. The original version includes about 1000 images and other graphical elements.

For years, the Eames family has hoped to make this educational resource available to the general public in digital form. The advent of iPads and other tablets has created the logical means. Thanks to programming support from IBM, we are turning Charles and Ray’s original timeline into an interactive version called Minds of Modern Mathematics.

Now, here’s where you come in: if you visit theEames Office Facebook page, you’ll see about two-dozen images posted that we need your help in identifying. We need to obtain the rights for all of these works or prove that they are in public domain, but before we can do that we have to track down the images themselves.

Our deadline is quickly approaching, so start looking now! We can calculate the order of magnitude of our collective knowledge once the app is complete, but in the meantime, you should know that our gratitude for your assistance is immeasurable.